1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate generally to positioning, socketing, and alignment of fine pitch bare and packaged semiconductor dice and testing systems for bare and packaged semiconductor dice.
2. Background Information
The push for ever-smaller integrated circuits (IC) places enormous performance demands on the techniques and materials used to construct IC devices. In general, an integrated circuit chip is also known as a microchip, a silicon chip, a chip, or a die. IC chips are found in a variety of common devices, such as the microprocessors in computers, cars, televisions, CD players, and cellular phones. A plurality of IC chips are typically built on a silicon wafer (a thin silicon disk, having a diameter, for example, of 300 mm) and after processing the wafer is diced apart to create individual chips (dies or dice).
As part of the manufacturing process, individual dice are tested to confirm the functioning of the die and provide feedback for the manufacturing process. Testing complex semiconductor dice under controlled electrical, thermal, and mechanical conditions in a cost-effective manner presents challenges as the size of IC chips shrinks and the number of features associated with an individual chip increases.